D&D 5E Slow Natural Healing in actual play

Taralan said:

It’s funny to see that a lot of people now consider it crippling for a pc to start a fight with anything less than full hit points. It really shows how the game went from having hp be a ressource that was managed during the entire adventure to a ressource that is now expected to be managed in each encounter.

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It's more like managing hit dice over the course of the adventure now in my experience. This is why I show the hit point and hit dice bars on the PC tokens in my Roll20 games. The hit dice bar tells everyone whether they can press on or not, more so than hit points.

Taralan said:

Personally I think this really cheapens the experience and removes a lot of strategic choices, also encouraging players to simply charge and destroy anything in their path, rather than seek to avoid or negotiate with potential threats.

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What I see is that players like combat challenges, especially if overcoming said challenges is tied to character advancement via XP. So in my opinion it's a little weird to expect them to want to do less of the things they like and that also allow them to gain levels. You'd have to make not engaging in combat at least as fun as fighting and tie character advancement to some other metric. Just changing how the hit points and healing work just means they can't do what they like as often or advance as quickly. To me, this means the overarching goal of having fun is potentially impacted.

Taralan said:

That being said I think it’s very difficult to remove this from 5e and return to a feeling closer to the older editions. I have tried a few of the alternate healing rules and none of them truly works. At the moment I am using half hit dice only during long rest and it sort of works but only if you are in a high encounters per day environment such as a dungeon. It’s very difficult to balance this if you have only a few encounters per day or even week.

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Dungeons seem to be lacking nowadays, at least in games that I play. I suspect that's because it's easier to come up with a three-act plot-based adventure in a city, prep-wise, than it is to come up with a complete, dynamic adventure location. The game really does work better in dungeons with a time constraint in my view in as much as resource management is concerned.

iserith said:

It's more like managing hit dice over the course of the adventure now in my experience. This is why I show the hit point and hit dice bars on the PC tokens in my Roll20 games. The hit dice bar tells everyone whether they can press on or not, more so than hit points.

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I agree that is a good way to emphasis the importance of Hit dice. The game itself however does not really tie anything to them, including long term injuries which are tied to hp still.

What I see is that players like combat challenges, especially if overcoming said challenges is tied to character advancement via XP. So in my opinion it's a little weird to expect them to want to do less of the things they like and that also allow them to gain levels. You'd have to make not engaging in combat at least as fun as fighting and tie character advancement to some other metric. Just changing how the hit points and healing work just means they can't do what they like as often or advance as quickly. To me, this means the overarching goal of having fun is potentially impacted.

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I do not think it’s that simple. I will give you an example. We are currently playing Tomb of Annihilation and I must say that WoTC has made a great job creating encounters with a lot of great possibilities for interactions and rewards outside of straight combat. However, recently faced with the grung village, where there is all sorts of nice conspirations between factions and a fun ritual and other shenanigans, my players again feeling strong and since attrition is not a problem given 5e rules and the possibility at most of a few encounters a day exploring the jungle simply charged in and destroyed the village, missing all of these great opportunities for exploration and role playing.

I can guarantee that this would never have happened in 1e or 2e since the player would never have risked charging head on and would have explored, interacted etc.

So I believe it had nothing do with encounter designs since the problem happens even in encounter designed to encourage a different approach and is due 100% to the rules, notably the healing and long/short rest paradigm in 5e. Unfortunately this is so baked into the system, the solution is not obvious.

Taralan said:

I agree that is a good way to emphasis the importance of Hit dice. The game itself however does not really tie anything to them, including long term injuries which are tied to hp still.

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What's tied to them is not being able to progress as far if you're out of them, mandating careful management. It's harder to earn XP without dying if you have no healing reserves. There are ways around that, of course, but increasing say the number of spell slots spent on restoring HP means less damage and utility spells in play which potentially increases challenge difficulty. It's a careful balance in my view. Throw a time constraint in there and now you've really got to make some solid decisions.

Taralan said:

I do not think it’s that simple. I will give you an example. We are currently playing Tomb of Annihilation and I must say that WoTC has made a great job creating encounters with a lot of great possibilities for interactions and rewards outside of straight combat. However, recently faced with the grung village, where there is all sorts of nice conspirations between factions and a fun ritual and other shenanigans, my players again feeling strong and since attrition is not a problem given 5e rules and the possibility at most of a few encounters a day exploring the jungle simply charged in and destroyed the village, missing all of these great opportunities for exploration and role playing.

I can guarantee that this would never have happened in 1e or 2e since the player would never have risked charging head on and would have explored, interacted etc.

So I believe it had nothing do with encounter designs since the problem happens even in encounter designed to encourage a different approach and is due 100% to the rules, notably the healing and long/short rest paradigm in 5e. Unfortunately this is so baked into the system, the solution is not obvious.

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Building on your idea that it's not so simple, perhaps it's not just hp/healing that is the root cause for your players' choices. Or any players' choices. A group of players that prefers combat over social interaction might always choose to fight than talk, especially if the way the DM handles social interaction challenges isn't entertaining or challenging. Or perhaps the DM doesn't award XP for overcoming social interaction challenges. Or maybe it wasn't obvious that there was a non-combat solution due to the way the DM presents the scene. It might be all of these things or something else entirely.

In your specific example, it might even be the encounter design: If the difficulty, both perceived and actual, was high enough, even players that love combat could reasonably be given pause. If they could just roll over the grung as it seems they did, and that was an undesirable outcome by some measure, then rather than change hp/healing, the DM can just scale up the difficulty of the challenge and the way the difficulty is described.

In short, I just think there are a ton more effective ways to get the desired result than changing hp/healing.

In our group, we basically say this:

We enforce 6-8 encounters per Long Rest, and 2 Short Rests in between.

It's not possible to get all of those in during a single gaming session (or even game day) the way we play, so we carry the number of encounters over from session to session until we've reached those 6-8 before we allow a Long Rest. So, an overnight rest isn't a Long Rest until they've had those number of encounters (balanced for difficulty, of course).

We basically hand-wave the justification with a bit of fluff like "if you're in a situation where you must post overnight watch, like in wilderness or a dungeon, it's not always possible to feel safe or relaxed enough to get the full benefits of a Long Rest. So, sleeping overnight is necessary but not always as recuperative as it is in a town or other secure location."

The overnight rest is basically a Short Rest. They don't recover Hit Dice, Hit Points, levels of Exhaustion, or Spell Slots. The only difference from a short rest is spellcasters can change up their Spells Prepared at dawn (or whenever their chosen time is).

So far, that's upped the level of stress, spell conservation, and strategy in the party considerably. We're all really careful, and players are trying all sorts of more clever, strategic methods of dealing with things - and the skill players are getting a lot more focus and time to shine.

schnee said:

In our group, we basically say this:

We enforce 6-8 encounters per Long Rest, and 2 Short Rests in between.

It's not possible to get all of those in during a single gaming session (or even game day) the way we play, so we carry the number of encounters over from session to session until we've reached those 6-8 before we allow a Long Rest. So, an overnight rest isn't a Long Rest until they've had those number of encounters (balanced for difficulty, of course).

We basically hand-wave the justification with a bit of fluff like "if you're in a situation where you must post overnight watch, like in wilderness or a dungeon, it's not always possible to feel safe or relaxed enough to get the full benefits of a Long Rest. So, sleeping overnight is necessary but not always as recuperative as it is in a town or other secure location."

The overnight rest is basically a Short Rest. They don't recover Hit Dice, Hit Points, levels of Exhaustion, or Spell Slots. The only difference from a short rest is spellcasters can change up their Spells Prepared at dawn (or whenever their chosen time is).

So far, that's upped the level of stress, spell conservation, and strategy in the party considerably. We're all really careful, and players are trying all sorts of more clever, strategic methods of dealing with things - and the skill players are getting a lot more focus and time to shine.

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I have Official Game Mechanic Rests tied to an experience point milestone (i.e. the first Short Rest of the day is at 33% of the Daily Budget, the second Short Rest is at 66%, and a Long Rest can occur at 100%). Now, the characters must still 'rest', such as sleeping overnight, and resting after extreme physical exertion, or face levels of exhaustion. It's just that the Game Mechanic stuff like spell slots, hit points, and so forth do not replenish until certain milestones are reached when they do take a 'rest'.

This pretty much solves the problem of game balance between Short Rest Dependents (Warlock & Fighter) and Long Rest Dependents (spellcasters), and keeps long journeys interesting (the Party can't nova each and every day/encounter).

Taralan

"It’s funny to see that a lot of people now consider it crippling for a pc to start a fight with anything less than full hit points. It really shows how the game went from having hp be a ressource that was managed during the entire adventure to a ressource that is now expected to be managed in each encounter."

I would tend to agree... If i had seen this attitude in 'a lot of people"

I haven't even seen it in a lot of people in this thread.

The std dnd expected for 5e is 2-3 hostile encounters between rests and its by no means guaranteed that they will be at full for each encounter. Iirc the "standard" is also 6-8 between long rests.

So it does not seem to me by "standard" assumptions or by the play i have seen that "lots" of cases will be full hp at every encounter.

But the key to this is the GM and challenges presented. Apparently, "some" have had folks camping in dungeons since ye olde days. Others have different settings and setups.

To my way of seeing it this has not changed much... Always varied by group and situation.

But then iirc one if the earliest written documents lamented how things were better in the old days and how "kids these days..."



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iserith said:

. Building on your idea that it's not so simple, perhaps it's not just hp/healing that is the root cause for your players' choices. Or any players' choices. A group of players that prefers combat over social interaction might always choose to fight than talk, especially if the way the DM handles social interaction challenges isn't entertaining or challenging. Or perhaps the DM doesn't award XP for overcoming social interaction challenges. Or maybe it wasn't obvious that there was a non-combat solution due to the way the DM presents the scene. It might be all of these things or something else entirely.

In your specific example, it might even be the encounter design: If the difficulty, both perceived and actual, was high enough, even players that love combat could reasonably be given pause. If they could just roll over the grung as it seems they did, and that was an undesirable outcome by some measure, then rather than change hp/healing, the DM can just scale up the difficulty of the challenge and the way the difficulty is described.

In short, I just think there are a ton more effective ways to get the desired result than changing hp/healing.

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I agree that all of these elements can contribute to the issue . However I happen to be DMing the same group of players for 35 years so can somewhat “control” for some of these variables and in that case confirm that system does matter. The same players faced with easier healing will tend to be less creative and reduce their interaction and exploration and use straightforward combat more often. While combat is certainly an interesting part of the game, variations in approach is certainly better and it seems, at least for my player, to be reduced by the easier healing mechanics of newer editions. But again this is so ingrained in the system the solution is not obvious.

I have experimented with some of the suggestions above, I.e. tying the rests with milestone and it does work mechanically but seems a little contrived in play, especially if for story reasons a week goes by and the pc do not heal at all nor regain their spells because no xp milestones have elapsed. To those who have suggested this approach how do you deal with this ?

But the key to this is the GM and challenges presented. Apparently, "some" have had folks camping in dungeons since ye olde days. Others have different settings and setups.

To my way of seeing it this has not changed much... Always varied by group and situation.

But then iirc one if the earliest written documents lamented how things were better in the old days and how "kids these days..."

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This seems rather dismissive of the problem. Just because you have not encountered it does not mean it does not exists and suggesting that people who do are just old grognard yelling to kids to “get off their lawn” is unhelpful.

As mentioned above I happen to be an a position to directly compare the effect of this on the game on the same players and have noticed a definitive shift in the game because of this. You can also experience it by switching to somewhat harsher systems such as Savage worlds which has slower natural healing and low and behold you will see your players suddenly coming up with all sorts of creative way to avoid direct confrontation because of the harsher consequences, especially for smaller, less critical encounters.

I agree with you that with a structure of 6-8 encounters per day , the healing rules work pretty well, but that structure is difficult to always respect in practice, unless all you do is dungeons. Also it’s very difficult to make smaller, less dangerous encounters matter because all of the ressource attrition is mostly gone, hp, fighter maneuvers, even spells via arcane recovery etc being regained quite quickly by a short rest immediately after, which again encourages just dismissing with said encounter by a quick combat rather than engaging with the story, unless of course you make all of these incidental encounters deadly but this has its own problems ...

Taralan said:

This seems rather dismissive of the problem. Just because you have not encountered it does not mean it does not exists and suggesting that people who do are just old grognard yelling to kids to “get off their lawn” is unhelpful.

As mentioned above I happen to be an a position to directly compare the effect of this on the game on the same players and have noticed a definitive shift in the game because of this. You can also experience it by switching to somewhat harsher systems such as Savage worlds which has slower natural healing and low and behold you will see your players suddenly coming up with all sorts of creative way to avoid direct confrontation because of the harsher consequences, especially for smaller, less critical encounters.

I agree with you that with a structure of 6-8 encounters per day , the healing rules work pretty well, but that structure is difficult to always respect in practice, unless all you do is dungeons. Also it’s very difficult to make smaller, less dangerous encounters matter because all of the ressource attrition is mostly gone, hp, fighter maneuvers, even spells via arcane recovery etc being regained quite quickly by a short rest immediately after, which again encourages just dismissing with said encounter by a quick combat rather than engaging with the story, unless of course you make all of these incidental encounters deadly but this has its own problems ...

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Funny, i thought the comment about how "lots of" was pretty dismissive in its own way.

Now my group is not yours and only 2 of my players have been with me since our first "dungeon" in 1980, but still i think i have a little bit of reference for observing the differences that systems have on players.

So first thing first, in *many cases* a system is chosen because of how well it reflects the "setting". usually a system with slow healing has that feature because it reflects a setting where that makes sense and usually that is also reflected in a lot of other things - often that includes fewer healing resources, fewer major boosts to defenses and the like - in other words a grittier and overall more dangerous system.

So, yes, when we have played more "gritty" scifi, low magic fantasy, cyberpunk (non-anime) spies and horror style games then in those games due to both the plethora of rules **AND** the setting expectations itself, the players chose different types of approaches, different preferences for "wade in" vs talk, etc etc etc. But the key thing is it wasn't "the slow natural healing" that was the culprit but the lack of lots of resources for healing, often damage related consequences etc.

Switch the same player to high end or golden age supers, high fantasy, high magic fantasy, anime-cyber-punk etc etc. and again different behaviors and such but not because of the "natural healing" but the totality os the system and setting and expected archetypes and tropes.

This is where i have had so much of an issue with the idea that just changing the natural healing rule creates some major change in behavior instead of just changing the optimization strategies. there is still easy ways to get to "quickly healed after a long rest."

Thats where i also take issue with whether or not this "adventure resource" thing is new somehow... its been around and a difference in style and play since the earliest days i was running games and seeing other groups play. To me we are not "lots" now but are where we always were "some" and it is dependent on style.

As for 6-8/d, absolutely - that is just aht standard model they used to balance rules around and is in fact not a panacea. What it does provide though is a "baseline" a Gm can use to evaluate how his game difference and where he might need to switch things up.

In a lot of different threads and discussions you have GMs who observe that it does not have to be 6-8 but can be 4-5 and still provide the same resource hit *if* they adjust upward the encounter difficulty. two difficult encounters then short rest then another pair slightly tougher with a short rest and then a bigger finale can work well as can many other structures with fewer encounters.

But the key is the GM has to present and structure the challenges in such a way as to through the story create the need to keep moving.

of course this should be mixed in with the opposite - cases where you do run into only one resource drain that is big...

one of my personal faves is a case where the first "leg" involves a BIG BAD (sometimes *the* Big Bad) which really drains the resources quite a bit and is often quite a surprise with added tension.) The the dead big Bad leaves a huge flurry of activity where if the PCs decide to take a lot of downtime they lose out on a lot of objectives and goals so their *hurry* may be to "rescue the captives before the others realize the jig is up" or "stop the lieutenants from getting away with the goods" and so on and so forth.

To me the part of the flaw in DND5e as far as this goes is not enough info about how to adjust and when to adjust away from their encounter path. Whether its how its worded or what or maybe a holdover from 4e there seems to be too much of a sense of "stick to the CR" even without noticing how far off standard you are.

It would have been great to have a few "benchmarks" provides possibly in the form of several "combats" set pieces or even just estimated damage levels.

That said, to me if you are aiming a game at a broad audience not just experienced GMs, having the system balanced around classes with abilities spread about thru "short rest" and "long rest" balances and expecting the new GMs to be able to manage that is not the smartest choice in my opinion. it would have been more likely better with either "long rest" or "short rest" as the mostly universal class ability time frame (perhaps with exceptions for each class at new tier abilities.)

But enough rambling about "shoulda coulda woulda if i were's"... I suspect that even in your experience with the same players, like i with mine, there were actually quite a few differences that added to the "option preferences" from one setting-system-expectations trio to another.

i also still believe the "problem" of "lots of players" expecting to enter each scenario fully healthy or some sort of OMG CRIPPLED backlash is more a matter of differences in expectations between the game the Gm is running and the game the players thought they were getting.

But to me it keeps coming back to getting the RPG TRIO setting and the system and the expectations on the same page... as it always has.

Taralan said:

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I have experimented with some of the suggestions above, I.e. tying the rests with milestone and it does work mechanically but seems a little contrived in play, especially if for story reasons a week goes by and the pc do not heal at all nor regain their spells because no xp milestones have elapsed. To those who have suggested this approach how do you deal with this ?

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I make sure and award experience for non-combat encounters, which helps. I also have four levels of "natural healing":

Refresh: you may spend 1 healing die per point of Constitution (must take roll). Requires one Action
Revitalize: you may spend any available healing dice (take roll or average). Requires Short Rest [90mins – (10mins*lifestyle)]
Recuperate: you regain ½ hit points and ½ healing dice (round up on each). You may spend healing dice as in Revitalize. Requires Long Rest [24hrs ÷ lifestyle]
Convalesce: you regain all hit points and healing dice. In addition, you restore ability damage equal to your Constitution modifier +1d4. If more than one ability score is damaged, this restorative is spread evenly amongst them. Requires Extended Rest [11 days – lifestyle]

If they can achieve an Extended Rest, I simply waive the milestone requirement. As for the verisimilitude issue, it isn't much of a difference at all really. You already have a spellcaster going from 0 to full spell slots with a nap, a fighter only able to regain his breath 2-3 times a day, a paladin pulling a can of whoop-a$$ a few times a day, etc, etc, etc. So, when my players have their characters rest for the night because it's a been a long day of murder-hoboing, and they ask, I simply tell them if they qualify for a Short or Long Rest. Or not.

Syntallah said:

I make sure and award experience for non-combat encounters, which helps. I also have four levels of "natural healing":

Refresh: you may spend 1 healing die per point of Constitution (must take roll). Requires one Action
Revitalize: you may spend any available healing dice (take roll or average). Requires Short Rest [90mins – (10mins*lifestyle)]
Recuperate: you regain ½ hit points and ½ healing dice (round up on each). You may spend healing dice as in Revitalize. Requires Long Rest [24hrs ÷ lifestyle]
Convalesce: you regain all hit points and healing dice. In addition, you restore ability damage equal to your Constitution modifier +1d4. If more than one ability score is damaged, this restorative is spread evenly amongst them. Requires Extended Rest [11 days – lifestyle]

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How does spell slot recovery work in your system?